[Techtalk] sudden, strange DNS/server issues...

[Walt]

Hi folks...

After struggling for three days with this odd issue, I'm
here to beg for help!

Friday of last week I got a call from my office that our
Java/Tomcat/Apache-based job tracker stopped working.
(Server's running Fedora Core  7, 2.6.22.9-91 SMP on a
Core 2 Duo processor)

Logged into the server and found that 'uptime' displayed
a 1002.00 server load! I ran 'top' and it said that CPU use
was at .2% and there didn't seem to be anything strange
at the top of the list or anything utilizing much RAM.
I don't know the command (if there is one) to monitor
disk utilization, so it's possible that something could've
been writing massively to disk.

At any rate, I rebooted the server, job app ran fine
again, and all seemed to be well. However, ever
since then our DNS resolution seems to be screwed
up and painfully, extremely slow! I've been unable to
find any cause for this. This system is a caching
nameserver for a our network and handles some
internal network name resolution. I've tried to changing
its named delegation to OpenDNS and that makes no
difference, but if I change an individual workstation to
point to OpenDNS everything seems to work fine.

A speedtest on http://speedtest.net shows 26 Mb, so
our actual speed seems just fine.

Where should I start looking...? I don't even know what
to start with... I tried updating the bind packages, but
that made no difference either.

Thanks in advance for any help or pointers!
Walt


-~



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     judge of his own happiness.  Hence legislation should aim
     at the removal of those restrictions on the free action of
     an individual which are not necessary for securing the
     like freedom on the part of his neighbours.
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